~ Thoughts on words, books, theology, and life.

Penelope Lively on the Need for Narrative

“We have this need for narrative, it seems. A life is indeed a ‘tick-tock’: birth and death with nothing but time in between. We go to fiction because we like a story, and we want our lives to have the largesse of story, the capacity, the onward thrust—we not only want, but need, which is why memory is so crucial, and without it we are lost, adrift in a hideous eternal present.”